


The Many Faces of Clara Oswald

by FezofRassilon



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Caecilius/Frobisher/12 theory, Clara echoes, F/F, light self!cest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 12:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17059958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FezofRassilon/pseuds/FezofRassilon
Summary: Clara Oswald has herselves round to dinner, and it turns out her echoes have been busy.(Takes place after The Girl who Died)A bit of a drabble, with some light hurt and a bit of comfort. Told from Clara's POV.





	The Many Faces of Clara Oswald

Faces, faces, faces.   
  
All of them mine. I used to have a vanity in my room. Still do, of course, but this was a different one. This one had three mirrors. The Doctor always used to take me to task about it. Said I could just turn my head. I got rid of it eventually, not because I actually listened to him – mark my words, if you ever hear me take his advice on anything domestic, you’ll know I’ve been replaced by a robot or a zygon or something. No, the reason I got rid of it was because I don’t like being crowded.   
  
Now, before we go on, I want to make this clear. I’m not an egomaniac. I have an entirely sensible understanding of my own self-importance, which has only moderately been shifted by the fact that you probably wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for me. But I know the universe doesn’t revolve around me. Granted, I’ve been to the dead centre of the universe, but that’s just geography.   
  
Anyway, I’m telling you this because I’m currently having dinner with six women who all have my face.   
  
It’s my fault. A while ago, I sort of jumped into a scar in time and space and got versions of myself scattered across the universe. No big deal. It’s the sort of thing I do on Wednesdays. Oh, listen to me, I’m starting to sound like him now. It was a big deal and I did it. But now, anywhere there’s a Doctor, there’s a Clara, holding the future together.   
  
Problem is, the Doctor likes to hang around in twenty-first century London. I’d like to say it’s all because of me, but truth is London’s a breeding ground for weird. And only about twelve percent of that is me. And every time he appears, another one of me shows up on the radar, and with all of them being as nosy as I am, it was only a matter of time before they noticed all the others.   
  
Which is why it’s my turn to host the monthly Clara Club meet up.   
  
On my immediate right is Clara, and behind here there’s Clara, who’s in the middle of a heated debate with Clara. There’s Clara at the other end of the table, minding her own business, and then there’s two Claras making eyes at each other. And that’s how many times I’ve said my own name in the past minute?   
  
Let’s simplify this. There’s me, Clara Prime (the best one). Clara two, let’s call her Nigella, because she’s making oddly sexual noises while eating a cupcake. Queen Clara is bickering with Scottish Clara about music. Clarabella seems to have bought knitting. I haven’t asked how old she is, but I’d guess early sixties. And as for Clara and Clara, early twenties. One’s a goth and one’s wearing a frankly shocking amount of pink. I might need to find a new way to identify them soon because I suspect by tomorrow they’ll be wearing each other’s clothes. But for now, they’re Pinky and Morticia.   
  
What do we talk about? Ourselves, mostly. We’re not all the same, not even close, but there are certain similarities. We’re all allergic to soy, for example. We all have a particular weakness to red wine, and we all have a guilty inclination to the fiction of Valeria Eros, but only Clarabelle is brazen enough to read them in public. We think she must have been a Clara in the past, the way she seems to know exactly what gets us going.   
  
Ahem. Actually, that’s something. Past Claras. Some of us at the table have been here for a few years, and this is actually Morticia’s first club meeting. My first meeting was maybe four months ago, assuming my timeline’s in order. But Clarabelle – this isn’t even her first group. Back when she lived in Wales, she had a whole other group of Claras. She kept a book. Half of it is minutes from past meetings, some of it’s doodles. A lot of it is messages from past Claras, some well-wishing, some speculation about the Doctor. It seems to go back ages. Regency era, probably (I haven’t read it all yet, but without photographs there might never have been a way for Claras to find each other).   
  
It fell to Clarabelle to carry the book on. She was the last of that group until she found us. Someday it will be one of us. What seems to happen is that whenever a Clara meets the Doctor, she tends to die soon after. And all that’s left of her, left of us, is in that book.   
  
A quick confession now- I haven’t told them about the time scar. They don’t know I’m the reason they’re here. How can I? I’m the only one to meet the Doctor and live. I’m the only one whose story goes on past the final chapter. How would you feel you were on a sinking ship, and only you could breathe underwater?   
  
But there’s another reason. This club. I could take my turn writing in the book, I could tell my story, tell everyone the answer to the great mystery, let everyone know the reason you’re never more than ten feet away from a Clara in London, but that would be it. No more club. No more reason to hang out. There’s no solution that’s better than the mystery. So I just sit here, and I talk, and I laugh, and I lie. I lie my pretty little teeth off.   
  
After dinner, Pinky gathered us on one side of the table for a selfie. All seven in one picture. Another one for the book. I can’t quite remember how, but somehow it fell to me to print the picture. I told them I don’t exactly have a knack for computers; printers especially seem to have it out for me, but it fell to me anyway. Maybe they just thought I looked responsible. Or maybe Clarabelle needed a reason to pass the book onto me. But all of a sudden, I was carrying the weight of my own history, and even more faces to stare back at me on every page.   
  
So that’s how I spent the rest of the evening: on my laptop, trying to get the wireless printer to work, with the TV on in the background, and another glass of red wine. Shut up, don’t judge me.   
  
So many Claras.   
  
Anyway, maybe a few minutes before I was going to drive a pickaxe through my printer, something came on the TV that caught my attention. It was the Doctor. My Doctor.   
  
Last I’d seen him, we’d just saved a tribe of Vikings from a race of Space misogynists (God I love our travels) He’d been a mess of grey hair and rebellion. But this Doctor- he was composed. He had glasses and was dressed in a grey suit. It was his face, and yet it wasn’t. And what’s more, the programme said, he’d been dead since 2009.   
  
It probably says a lot about me that I was relieved to hear that. I’ll be the first to say that it this isn’t a healthy response, but I immediately rejected the idea. I know that if someone’s been dead for six years, they couldn’t be the Doctor. He’s never stayed that still in his life. If the Doctor had died, he’d have had the common courtesy to tell me.   
  
No, this was just someone who looked like the Doctor. As the TV later said, he was John Frobisher, a civil servant who killed himself and his family during the 4-5-6 event. I paid attention after that. Admittedly, I’d been at uni when the whole thing transpired, and probably absorbed in some book or other, which was where I tended to escape to in those days. I’d heard about it later, but there must have been a fair bit of cover-up, because no-one had a clear idea about what happened for years afterwards. This was the first show I’d seen that claimed to have all the answers.   
  
I couldn’t help thinking about the Doctor. Where was he during all this? Had he not seen the news? Or maybe it was because he’d seen the news that he couldn’t. I’d never quite got my head around all the Rules of Time he’d tried to teach me, but I think one of them was that you couldn’t interfere in an event if you know how it ends. If you change the outcome, you change your involvement. Cue paradox.   
  
Had he been taught that in the same way I had? Had someone sat him down to tell him, back in the days where he would actually pay attention to authority figures, or did he just have some innate sense of what he could change and what he couldn’t? Maybe back in his days at the Academy, they’d taught him and all the other Time Tots as much history as possible, to cement the universe in their minds, and make it so they’d never even try to change it. If so, it had only half worked.   
  
But maybe this was one of those times he couldn’t intervene, or wouldn’t. How could he not, when Earth’s children were suffering? Only in a time when the Doctor was someone else could this possibly happen.   
  
A few days and about a thousand years ago, the Doctor had picked a fight with a Norse God, and a girl had died. He’d stared at his reflection until his eyes had burned their way into his soul. Asked himself, who am I to let this happen. And he’d answered himself by shaping his own body. His face had once belonged to a Roman man he’d once thought doomed. He’d forced his way through the tiniest of loopholes in time just to save someone, anyone. And to hold him to that code, he’d made given himself a constant reminder. Every time he’d look in a mirror, or a puddle, or a TARDIS screen from then on, he’d be reminded that no law of man or nature would ever stop him being a good man.   
  
I wonder, looking at Frobisher now, if this wasn’t penance too. There must be millions of people the Doctor saved, and millions more he hadn’t. Why would Caecilius be the face that embodied that code? No, I know the Doctor. He’ll brave a supernova to save a kitten. Even if there’s an easier way. He hurts, deep down, and he thinks he needs to hurt.   
  
I wonder if he didn’t choose this face to hurt himself, to remind himself what happens when he doesn’t intervene.   
  
Scrub the sins from this face, he’ll tell himself. Work until this face is yours and not his.   
  
Shit, it’s Wednesday and I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa. The Doctor’s going to be here in half an hour and I haven’t even printed out the picture. It’s fine. This is all doable. I can sort this computer stuff out and get dressed, maybe just put my hair in a pony tail and then-   
  
“Clara! You’re dressed and ready to go, I see!”   
  
There’s the Doctor, in my house, early for once in his life. I can’t even tell if he’s being sarcastic.   
  
“You’re early.” I retort.   
  
“Well, you know, daylight savings time.”   
  
“Nice try, but that’s not for another two months.”   
  
“No, I mean we have to go and save daylight. There’s this big space shark that’s threatening to eat the sun.”   
  
“Right, this sun shark. Can it wait?” I ask as I dash into the bathroom.   
  
“Well yes, but only because I made it up so I don’t have to admit I don’t know how daylight savings works.”   
  
I put my head back round the door, toothbrush in hand. “You’re terrible.” I say.   
  
“I know,” He smirks. “And what’s this, by the way?”   
  
He’s holding the Book of Claras. And there’s no way he’s missed that title. No time now, he can mock me for that later.   
  
“Is it a diary?”   
  
“A diary that starts two hundred years before I was born?”   
  
“Do you not have those?”   
  
“Put it down, it’s not finished.”   
  
“Oh, what still needs doing?”   
  
“I’ve got to print out a photo. It’s still on the computer, can you do something about it?”   
  
“Yeah, sure, you know I speak printer.”   
  
“Oh, you do not.”   
  
Of course he does. And almost immediately the picture is out of the printer and in his hand. I snatch it from him and go to stick it in.   
  
“Who are all these people?” he asks, staring over my shoulder.   
  
“You’re kidding, right?”   
  
He’s got a strange sense of sarcasm. I’ve never got it.   
  
“I recognise you, but who are all these other people?”   
  
He really doesn’t know.   
  
“They’re all me. Did you not notice that?”   
  
“No. They’re not you. They don’t even look like you. You’re you.”   
  
“They’re echoes. Echoes of me. Remember when I stepped into your teamstream and saved your life literally millions of times? They’re them.”   
  
“Ah.”   
  
“Ah?”   
  
“I thought maybe you were holding your face to account.”   
  
“Any comment about the state of my face will not be appreciated at this time. Besides, you were early! I didn’t have time to get ready.”   
  
“No, no, no. I mean, doing what I did. Trying to find a face that makes you… you.”   
  
He has an annoying habit of making a decent point. I permit him to continue.   
  
“All of these faces, all the echoes in this book. They’re all a part of you, in a way, and you’ve been learning from them. Letting the Claras of your past lead the way for the Clara of today. All these stories, all these lives, all these weird sex tips –sorry I read that bit- all of these you made and they make you. You may be shamelessly copying me, but you… there was and there will always be only one Clara Oswald, and that’s you.”   
  
I look at him now, his smile a little bit sad and pleading, his wrinkled skin sagging around his celestial eyes, sincere in a body that doesn’t quite know how to handle sincerity. Okay, no, stop it Clara. No crying today. We are very much not doing that.   
  
“Right, so that sun shark. You’re sure it’s not real?”   
  
“I’m sure there’s one somewhere. We could find it and let it loose?”   
  
“Bit irresponsible.”   
  
"Not if we catch it before it hurts anybody." He pauses. “You’re crying.”   
  
“No, I’m not.”   
  
“You are. Look in the mirror.”   
  
He’s right of course. Annoyingly.   
  
And there I am again, learning from my face.


End file.
